Can you recover?

The typical response among engineers and developers when the topic of disaster recovery pops up is a look of despair crossed with ennui. Although this attitude doesn't negatively affect the DR efforts of many organizations, IT departments overall have some work to do.

Six years after the events of 9/11, many corporate IT operations are overconfident about their ability to handle a disaster, according to a Forrester Research, Inc. report released on Tuesday.

The survey of 189 data center decision makers found a severe lack of IT preparation for natural and manmade disasters.

For example, the report found that 27% of the respondents' data centers in North America and Europe do not run a failover site to recover data in the event of a disaster. About 23% of respondents said they do not test disaster recovery plans, while 40% test their plans at least once a year. About 33% percent of respondents described their operations as "very prepared" for a manmade or natural disaster while 37% called their sites simply "prepared" for such events.

Stephanie Balaouras, a senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester, said she was surprised at how "overly confident' enterprises are about their ability to confront disasters when they their preparation is actually minimal.

"Without regular testing, the chance that your disaster recovery plan will execute flawlessly during a disaster is pretty slim," said Balaouras, who authored the report. "The last thing you want is to have no idea how to recover" from a disaster.

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2 Comments

testing is always a good idea! I think Marks and Spencers tested their DR plans and systems a few years back. It worked great ...... until they tried to switch back to their "regular" systems and it all fell apart. End result was they were running at about 50% for two weeks. :)

Actually,we didn't test disaster recovery plans too because we think the lost data can be recovered by so many data recovery softwares,as EASEUS DATA RECOVERY WIZRD,easy recovery's,and so on. A disaster recovery plans testing is so inconvenient, we enjoy recovering it easily and in the mean time we have confidence with these programs.

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